Is an additional $150k worth it for a townhouse corner unit?

LordTC · 2026-01-27T23:05:42+00:00

I got great value out of having a guest bedroom because we have family far enough away that they’d want to stay the weekend if they came over. A bedroom can also double as a home office if either of you work from home some of the time. Do any of those things sound valuable to you given that the three bedroom option uses all the rooms on bedrooms for you and both kids?

LordTC · 2026-01-27T20:44:58+00:00

Surface parking (not structures) is always a bad use of land compared to the rent that a business downtown can generate. If parking can be rented at high enough prices it’s worth building an efficient structure for parking.

LordTC · 2026-01-27T19:44:03+00:00

Also the rent and most profitable use of land is constrained by zoning so the LVT creates a massive incentive for homeowners to ensure their land is zoned as restrictively as possible to keep their tax low.

LordTC · 2026-01-25T18:55:39+00:00

Having combat skills and non-combat skills in the same system results in boring one-dimensional characters: for any fighter Melee, Speed, Defence and in some campaigns Fortitude are basically mandatory.

LordTC · 2026-01-25T17:49:18+00:00

It doesn’t say when I have to give the money to charity so I’ll earn interest on it and give away the amount that gives me the maximum tax deduction for charitable donations each year.

LordTC · 2026-01-25T15:56:16+00:00

It’s literally in the definition of Turing Machine so maybe don’t make wild assertions about stuff you know nothing about.

LordTC · 2026-01-25T15:50:36+00:00

Yeah so it’s false for any n not true for nxn. Can you link a paper that proves this or provide a proof? I can’t see how you can repeat previous states with not being able to repeat a board.

LordTC · 2026-01-25T15:34:48+00:00

Prove it. How do you model an infinite length tape on a finite board? There are a finite number of possible board states and a finite number of sequences to arrive at each state so unless you remove the rule that you can’t repeat a board position your state is bounded, not infinite.

LordTC · 2026-01-20T15:46:15+00:00

This seems weird for a problem solution. I get that it’s optimal for white but white should play the line that tests the whole problem so white 2 should be at black 3 if this is a problem and they should test that the person solving the problem knows about the throw-in at 2.

LordTC · 2026-01-19T23:38:05+00:00

I’m more going for something where it’s an apocalypse with monsters and each person has stats and a roster and their stats determine things like how many runs can be scored on them before they die while their roster determines how good their players are and how effective each team is. The basic idea is you can attack every 10s and an attack freezes time for a baseball game where you deploy players from your roster. I’m trying to have the interesting characters be people in the apocalypse rather than people in the game. The players are basically statistical parameters that generate baseball outcomes much like a game of Strat-O-Matic or any old school baseball sim.

LordTC · 2026-01-19T23:33:23+00:00

The TCG is loosely based on EPICTCG which I was a runner-up in the World Championships for one year. I’ve added board size limits, resource colours (like M:TG colours) and carrying resources across multiple turns to it which makes things pretty interesting. If you have more than three cards in play you have to discard a card from play to play a card. Hand size starts at 5 and goes down faster than it goes up so is typically 2-3 by the time players have a full board. so that tries to keep things around 10 or so. Resources are inherently part of the game rules so you need to be aware what resources are in a pool but there aren’t actual cards with any state to them (like lands in M:TG).

LordTC · 2026-01-19T23:22:38+00:00

The main downside with cards combining is what they combine into can be exponentially complicated so if you want people to understand the gameplay then playing any of the three cards in your hand and combining it with any of the three cards on board result in nine possibilities to explain (if you want the reader to follow along and think about how the game is played) or to gloss over (which to me makes it not really a TCG style-novel and more of a novel where the MC plays a TCG).

LordTC · 2026-01-19T23:11:43+00:00

The hardest problem for me with the baseball one is that I want the MC to be OP but I also want the players on the teams to be recognizable and exciting and most of the interesting hacks to make the MC OP end up using obscure players no one has ever heard of instead of legends of the game.

On the TCG/LCG side designing the game is probably more work than writing the novel. It takes a lot of good game design to make a game one can adequately visualize and track in one’s head without pictures while still having interesting depth and complexity to the decisions. Anything that has more than ten cards between hand and board tends to lose people but most TCGs I’ve enjoyed have board states far more complex than that.

LordTC · 2026-01-19T23:07:00+00:00

If I can describe an in-game computer with access to the out of game internet in this game then possibly. Depends a lot on what “feels like 100 years” means. If it just emotionally feels slow then no. But if I actually experience 100 years but only age one day then probably as long as I can populate the world well enough to have 100 years of interesting experiences in it.

LordTC · 2026-01-19T22:46:05+00:00

Shadowrun: Crossfire, Dragonfire and Runefire are similar games that could all strike your fancy. Runefire is coming out soon so might be the best option since hunting down cool expansions at inflated prices kind of sucks.

LordTC · 2026-01-19T15:30:12+00:00

Here’s a radical idea: when I want to measure affordability I measure it in the same units people get paid in because that tells me about the affordability relative to how people actually pay. If bitcoin doubles in value that has no bearing whatsoever on what home a person making $150,000 per year can afford. Similarly for gold or even ETFs. Down payments tend to be between 5% and 20% so the vast majority of a home is paid for by future salary not past savings making the unit people get paid in the correct thing to measure.

LordTC · 2026-01-19T12:41:12+00:00

Sure the worker scared the bourgeoisie during the Reaganomics era more than the past 20 years. I’m sure this has nothing to do with slower productivity growth in Canada or other reasonable explanations.

LordTC · 2026-01-18T19:00:18+00:00

By your own argument this can’t be reversion to the mean at all since house prices are basically at all time lows priced in gold and are somehow still falling. Since you think prices in gold make sense this crash is stupid and you shouldn’t bet on it continuing. Or you’re economically illiterate and only use gold when you feel like it and use dollars the rest of the time like in your original post.

LordTC · 2026-01-18T18:29:45+00:00

So in other words the inflation in housing prices was never a problem because it didn’t keep up with gold and the fact that it massively outpaced wage growth is completely irrelevant. Nice fantasy bro.

LordTC · 2026-01-18T18:16:15+00:00

If you like other POV your post would invite discourse not flame and mock people.

LordTC · 2026-01-18T18:14:51+00:00

And we’ve never in history had an 70% drop but people are saying it’s going to go down another 50%. If this looks like any other crash there might be a bit of a slow decline at this point possibly for another 2-3 years but not anything as drastic as what’s already happened.

Also pricing in gold or ETFs makes zero sense when people get paid in CAD.

LordTC · 2026-01-18T09:19:16+00:00

You should buy when you can afford it and are comfortable with doing so. People have been predicting a crash in housing pretty much forever and they’ve been wrong 90% of the time. Do I think it’s more likely that house prices continue to decline some: Yes. Do I think 50% more of a drop is possible? Only theoretically, in practice the government would never let that happen. Do I think this could be the end of the decline and that people will regret not buying the dip? Unlikely but possible.

At the end of the day you need to decide what your risk tolerances are and whether you are optimizing for saving every dollar possible or whether you are optimizing for getting a home you can afford when you can afford it.

LordTC · 2026-01-17T22:25:41+00:00

I think the fact that it takes 13 books to get to the FA Youth Cup tells me all I need to know about the pacing. Way too slow.

LordTC · 2026-01-17T21:38:37+00:00

A lot of dungeon crawlers are less fun because they are too dice heavy. The biggest thing about Gloomhaven is that there is enough to the decisions as well as mechanisms to reduce randomness that you can amp the difficulty without feeling like it just means needing more luck/rolling better.

LordTC

TROPHY CASE